Mandy Martin

Mandy Martin
Australian, born 1952

After Salvator Rosa: landscape with Apollo and the Cumaen Sibyll 2006
oil, ochre and pigment on linen
Geelong Gallery
Gift of Guy and Kim Abrahams through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program, 2020

Since the early 1980s Mandy Martin’s works have focused on human beings’ occupation of and impact on the landscape. Martin’s images are based on a lifetime of drawing in the landscape, and a sustained enquiry over the past three decades into post-settlement colonisation, and the historical/contemporary context of the artist/explorer.

Martin’s Salvator Rosa series is both an homage to the Baroque Italian painter and printmaker Salvator Rosa (1615–1673), and her excursions to the Salvator Rosa section of the Carnarvon National Park in central Queensland. Several series of paintings evolved from drawings made on trips to this section of the Park. Its spectacular rugged features inspired explorer Sir Thomas Mitchell to name the area in 1846 after the 17th century Italian painter because it evoked the historical artist’s landscapes. Martin invokes classical references and sources as, she states, ‘a counterpoint for my own narrative which seeks a contemporary reworking of issues of identity, possession of land and indigenousness.’